Sun Microsystems wanted $30 million to $50 million from Google for a Java license, but Google decided to build its own implementation for Android after negotiations broke down, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt reportedly said during testimony in the Oracle/Google trial today.

Jurors were shown an e-mail exchange between Schmidt and Jonathan Schwartz, the two CEOs of Google and Sun at the time Google developed and released Android. The e-mails showed the companies discussing a potential partnership between Google and Sun. Google didn’t object to the amount of money Sun wanted, but it didn’t want to give up too much control over Android.

"We would have paid that," Schmidt said of the $30 million to $50 million, according to our sister site Wired.

Instead of taking a Java license, Google began developing Dalvik, a "clean room implementation" that would be compatible with Java without using its code.

"We began a clean room implementation. A clean room implementation is what was developed, and uses a completely different approach internally" than Java, Schmidt said, according to a liveblog of his testimony posted by The Verge.

Oracle, which now owns Sun, accuses Google of violating Java copyrights and patents, and is seeking tens of millions of dollars in damages plus future royalties from Android revenue. While Oracle has accused Google of copying source code, Schmidt said Android "implements the language and implements the APIs but does not use the Java source code."

Oracle spent part of its time questioning Schmidt by "hammering Schmidt on the fact that there was no documentation of Sun's approval," The Verge reports.

Although negotiations did not result in a deal, Schmidt said Sun publicly supported Android at the time of its launch and that Schwartz "orally" communicated to him that Sun did not oppose the way it was implemented.

"I was very comfortable with what we were doing was both legally correct given the licenses or lack of licenses at the time," Schmidt said.

Schmidt said Google did not need a license to use Java, because "in general languages are usable because ... languages are usually in the public domain or they've been released. Sun's goal was always to make it as available as possible."

Schmidt knows a bit about Sun, having worked for the company between 1983 and 1997. Judge William Alsup wondered why Google bothered making a clean room implementation if a Java license wasn’t even necessary. According to The Verge’s liveblog, Schmidt explained that Google needed its own implementation so it could make the Android source code public, allowing developers to find bugs.

The trial began in US District Court in San Francisco last week, and is expected to last eight weeks. This first phase is dealing with Oracle’s copyright accusations, while a second phase will deal with patents. Several big names in tech have already taken the stand, including Android founder Andy Rubin, Google CEO Larry Page, and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. With the conclusion of Schmidt’s testimony, Oracle has rested its case in the copyright portion of the trial, Wired said.

I love how the story went from: 'we've never done anything wrong.. this is outrageous'to a lead engineer saying: 'we should pay for the license to use this tech'to the same engineer: 'oh no, I didn't mean what I said'to the CEO: 'well... the initial offer we totally knew about should stand... 50 mill tops!'

'well... the initial offer we totally knew about should stand... 50 mill tops!'

That's not what he said. He said they would have paid the 50 million, but it wasn't about the money. They decided they wanted the code to be public, which they couldn't do with a Java VM, so they ultimately built their own. That's his story. I'm actually surprised that this is such big news given that there are only 'tens of millions' at stake, a relative pittance. I suppose it's the implications of the outcome that matter most.

I see Google being crushed under all of the new licensing fees they'll be forced to pay to Oracle and Apple.

And I forsee them making up all those licensing fees with the money they are going to get from Apple for violating Moto's patents

Good luck with that... Also Motorola really does fight with Microsoft not Apple. They want 2.5% of the every Windows PCs sold because thats the only fair and reasonable amount of money they should get for all their "engineering efforts".

I see Oracle getting some money for the code that has been copied, inadvertently or on purpose. I see Google having to rewrite those sections that were copied. But i don't see Oracle getting continued licensing fees.

I see Google being crushed under all of the new licensing fees they'll be forced to pay to Oracle and Apple.

And I forsee them making up all those licensing fees with the money they are going to get from Apple for violating Moto's patents

Good luck with that... Also Motorola really does fight with Microsoft not Apple. They want 2.5% of the every Windows PCs sold because thats the only fair and reasonable amount of money they should get for all their "engineering efforts".

I love how the story went from: 'we've never done anything wrong.. this is outrageous'to a lead engineer saying: 'we should pay for the license to use this tech'to the same engineer: 'oh no, I didn't mean what I said'to the CEO: 'well... the initial offer we totally knew about should stand... 50 mill tops!'

The engineer said 'we should pay for the license to use this tech' under the assumption that a clean room implementation of java was not something that google was willing to undertake. Clearly his assumption was wrong.

The CEO said we'd happily pay $50 million, but we still wouldn't have enough control to release android under the open source license that its currently under. I don't think Sun would have allowed them to release it under google's preferred licensing at $500 million.

I love how the story went from: 'we've never done anything wrong.. this is outrageous'to a lead engineer saying: 'we should pay for the license to use this tech'to the same engineer: 'oh no, I didn't mean what I said'to the CEO: 'well... the initial offer we totally knew about should stand... 50 mill tops!'

The article doesn't give enough details to be sure, but it sounds like Sun wanted $50M to license its JVM to Google, and Google declined to pay because they didn't want to be bound by Sun's license on the source code, so they chose to build their own implementation.

And an engineer is (almost) never qualified to form a binding opinion on whether or not something needs to be licensed, that's what the lawyers are for - I'm not sure why Oracle is making a big deal over what he said.

So as I understand it, Sun said "Here, use our Java code for $50M". Google said "Thanks, but no thanks, we'll build our own and license it how we want". Dalvik's register based model is quite a bit different than Sun's stack based model (and some benchmarks show that it's slower), so I don't see how they can be accused of copying the code. Sure they replicated the API's, but that's how you build a product that's compatible with published API's.

I love how the story went from: 'we've never done anything wrong.. this is outrageous'to a lead engineer saying: 'we should pay for the license to use this tech'to the same engineer: 'oh no, I didn't mean what I said'to the CEO: 'well... the initial offer we totally knew about should stand... 50 mill tops!'

left out the ending quote to weary stock holders just in case things go sour, "android is important, but not critical."

They aren't in trouble for using the 37 java API's, they are in trouble for copying the API design and documentation from Sun/Oracle. API design is hard and valuable. One of Google's own java engineers, Joshua Block, testified as much. If Google wanted to copy them for compatability they would have paid for the license. But they weren't trying to be compatible. They wanted all the control. Being compatible is at odds with them having control. They wanted to appear like they were being compatible and open and Not Evil (TM).

If Judge Alsup rules that those API's are copyrightable, Google is not walking away for a mere $50 million. They can't just replace them with different API's and have Android OS and apps still work. Oracle will have all the leverage.

It shouldn't be, if you're any good as an engineer. Making an API is probably about as difficult as writing an instruction manual. If you're designing a library, most of your engineering effort goes into solving the problem you want to solve. The API is just how the library is presented to the user.

bsharp wrote:

If Judge Alsup rules that those API's are copyrightable, Google is not walking away for a mere $50 million.

It the judge rules that API's are copyrightable, it will have implications far wider than just costing Google money. It'll be almost impossible for anyone to release any extensible software product without hiring a team of lawyers.

The thing that I've always wondered why it isn't just staring everyone in the face with this whole case is that the Google SDK actually uses the Sun JDK for its compiler - the dalvik stuff just converts the JVM bytecode into Dalvik bytecode when it's being packaged into the .apk, and the API is provided as .jar files and so on. Google is quite obviously using Java stuff much moreso than the language. While the dalvik VM itself might have no code in common with JVM, it's pretty disinegenuous for Google to claim that no Sun Java property is being used in Android.

I see Oracle getting some money for the code that has been copied, inadvertently or on purpose. I see Google having to rewrite those sections that were copied. But i don't see Oracle getting continued licensing fees.

In the end this would be a win for Google.

No code was copied... The 9 lines in question was Google code that was submitted in June 2009 to Sun, which was Sun then incorporated into JDK 7 Milestone 5 in November 2009. The Oracle lawyers are idiots... The code they flagged that was copied, was actually Google code that was contributed to Java.

This is all on public record... I posted about it on the other thread. The release notes from Sun on JDK 7 Milestone 5, even stated the optimized sorting code was contributed by Google. And in the JDK mailing list, there is a post from Google, stating they would like to submit it to Sun, for inclusion in Java, and that it has already been integrated in Android.

Again, if you don't like the terms, why not write from scratch or license something else

Well aside from what was apparently 9 lines, they did just that. They leveraged an open source project to do so (Harmony) but nonetheless they did write a separate implementation.

Quote:

This stinks of "Hey we don't like your terms so we will use it anyways and take our chances"

If they had jacked Sun's source and used that, perhaps. I believe it's been established that aside from the 9 lines in question, they didn't use Sun's work.

kobolds wrote:

That Not going to happen . read the case of MS VS SUN , you will find alot identical

The argument in Sun vs. Microsoft was that MS was leveraging their position to deliberately break Java by creating an incompatible variant and calling it "Java." I don't see Google as having claimed their fork was "Java" nor that it was compatible.

Quote:

Bluff jurry maybe will work . that statement not going to work on programmer . even if you not using java code , since you're writing for same functionality , your code will eventually be the same

The code many eventually be the same, but unlike patents that doesn't suddenly make your code the property of the other author or put you in violation of any one else's rights.

Bluff jurry maybe will work . that statement not going to work on programmer . even if you not using java code , since you're writing for same functionality , your code will eventually be the same

Not necessarily. You can implement the same functionality with different algorithms running behind.

There will be some areas of overlap though as certain implementations have a few established commonly used algorithms. That is probably what Sun will get some small monetary damages for even though they shouldn't.

"Judge William Alsup wondered why Google bothered making a clean room implementation if a Java license wasn’t even necessary."

What kind of judge is this ?. It was just said clearly, that Sun demands a license for using their code. Not their language. Their code means Sun's implementation of the JVM!. A language is useless without an execution engine to run it. So doing a "clean room" implementation is a LEGAL way of reverse engineering a proprietary product. ie Not using the proprietary product but a legal emulated product that function the same way effectively without using the same methods of doing the atomic functions.

If Google used Sun's implementation of the JVM, then they had to abide by its license conditions. Google did not like the restrictive license so chose to write their own implementation. This case is going no where!. Oracle will lose!.

If Judge Alsup rules that those API's are copyrightable, Google is not walking away for a mere $50 million. They can't just replace them with different API's and have Android OS and apps still work. Oracle will have all the leverage.

the developer of a non-Microsoft, Intel-compatible PC operating system could circumvent the applications barrier to entry by cloning the APIs exposed by the 32-bit versions of Windows (Windows 9x and Windows NT). Applications written for Windows would then also run on the rival system, and consumers could use the rival system confident in that knowledge.

US v Microsoft established that you can indeed *copy* the API of another with impunity.

I see Google being crushed under all of the new licensing fees they'll be forced to pay to Oracle and Apple.

If only ars had a forum setting to ban dumbass posters with less than 250 posts, you know, the ones that post nothing but mindless trolling shit...that way, I wouldn't have to add them manually to the foe list.

It shouldn't be, if you're any good as an engineer. Making an API is probably about as difficult as writing an instruction manual. If you're designing a library, most of your engineering effort goes into solving the problem you want to solve. The API is just how the library is presented to the user.

I can only assume you're not a developer. Badly-designed APIs are legion. They're abundant. They are the common case. Most APIs are clunky, limited, and hard to work with.

Java's is by no means perfect, but it's actually pretty good in a lot of places, and pretty well thought-out. Time and effort has been put into creating a decent, useful, flexible, usable API.

There are many ways to express the concepts encapsulated in the Java API. Google didn't have to pick Sun's, but they did. They could have gone their own route (as Microsoft did with .NET: broadly similar concepts, but expressed differently). They just couldn't be bothered.

I think it's totally unreasonable to suggest that Sun didn't produce something of creative, expressive value with its API. It should be held to be copyrightable, IMO. Google isn't taking advantage of any reverse engineering/interop-essential argument here--Dalvik and Android don't actually run Java binaries--and I think that Oracle deserves to win. I don't think it will, but I think the expressive, creative content of an API description is non-negligible and is worthy of copyright protection.

I think Google should use the Pepsi defense. Coca-Cola and Pepsi are pretty much the same drink (don't argue flavor semantics with me please) but Pepsi didn't use Coke's formula, they made their own. Why can't life be that simple?